Depositions are a vital component of any trial preparation or court case. But a deposition transcript can run into the hundreds of pages of witness testimony, which can require many hours to be fully summarized, organized, and prepared for legal proceedings.
Summarizing an original transcript is a major component of case management, and in complex litigatio,n the cost can mount very high, given the hourly rate that must be paid to the legal professionals tasked with the deposition summary process.
But in the modern world, there must be a more efficient way to create a deposition summary than to sit down with a stack of papers and a highlighter. How can all of this time be saved, allowing the legal teams to put their energy toward other vital aspects of the case?
One great option is to use a company that specializes in deposition summaries and have them craft your deposition summary.
A company run by lawyers and paralegals, that uses expertly programmed AI to assist them in quickly summarizing long depositions, can create reliably professional summaries of deposition testimony, can save your legal team hours of tedious work without compromising quality or missing relevant information.
To understand the nature of the deposition summary process, we will look at a couple of real life deposition summary example passages. These deposition summaries were a key part of the resolution of the trials involved, and these examples will demonstrate that a team of legal professionals, aided by specialty AI, could easily give quality results.
Expert Testimony: How Deposition Summaries Provide Relevant Information
In many court cases, the deposition transcript of an expert witness often runs to hundreds of pages of highly technical information. Whether in civil or criminal cases, expert testimony can provide the lynchpin of a case, and making the relevant parts of the transcript accessible is a vital task for those creating the deposition summary.
But how can those writing deposition summaries make sure that they faithfully represent the information in the deposition testimony, while also trimming the lengthy deposition transcripts down to a manageable size?
For this task, page-line summaries are often the best choice. While writing a page-line deposition summary is a long and tedious process, the result is a very accurate representation of the relevant information–and, because each section of the summary contains a reference to a page and line of the deposition transcript, so that anyone reading the deposition summary can easily verify the information in the transcript itself.
Uses for Page-Line Summaries
In a civil malpractice suit, the plaintiff called in an expert witness to build the case against the defendant. The plaintiff claimed that the defendant, an OBGYN, had intentionally deceived the plaintiff into agreeing to an unnecessary surgery.
An expert witness was called to build the case against the defendant. This witness was another OBGYN with decades of experience in the field. The prosecuting attorney sat with this witness for over three hours in deposition, asking questions to prove to the judge that no scrupulous physician would have behaved the way the defendant had acted.
Below you will find a page from the deposition, followed by a page-line summary of the material within the page. After the example will be a discussion of how such a summary is superior to using the actual deposition transcript in the court case, and how such a summary could be generated.
Deposition Transcript
Page 23
Q. Doctor, you said earlier that hysterectomy is rarely necessary under circumstances similar to the current situation. Can you expand on that, and give us more reasons why and what you might have recommended in a similar situation?
A. Oh, sure, yeah, the patient here, your plaintiff, she had three large uterine fibroids. They were definitely causing her problems, reducing her fertility, abdominal discomfort, and heavy periods, that wasn’t an acceptable situation.
Personally, I have treated multiple patients with similar symptoms or even worse. A combination of hormone therapy and surgical removal of the fibroids is often enough to alleviate all the symptoms, and sometimes can completely reverse the condition.
But when the patient was told about the fibroids, her physician made this situation sound as scary as possible, you know? He told her that the fibroids are tumors… which they are, right, but they are benign, they wouldn’t have spread anywhere. But then he said that even if he removed them they would just grow back and keep hurting her and making her life miserable.
And he made her feel like this was an emergency, like if she didn’t schedule surgery right away the fibroids might metastasize, which is ridiculous, but she didn’t know. And he rushed her so badly that she made a decision without seeking a second opinion.
Page Line Deposition Summary
P23, L4 Patient had three large uterine fibroids; significant health impacts.
P23, L7 Witness has successfully treated similar symptoms without a hysterectomy.
P23, L9 The Physician intimidated the patient by implying that the fibroids were cancerous.
P23, L14 Physician created a false sense of urgency to rush the patient into surgery.
Page Line Summaries: How They Are Generated
As is demonstrated above, the goal of the page-line summary is to present all of the relevant facts in the deposition transcript in as concise a form as possible. This allows the most pertinent information to be brought to the forefront, while extraneous details and conversational interjections can be left out. This deposition summary example reduced the length of the transcript by 75% without sacrificing transcript accuracy.
How can an accurate and faithful page-line summary be generated, and how can AI help with this process without compromising the quality of the outcome?
Typically, when a legal team is working on creating a page-line summary, they might begin by going through the whole deposition with a highlighter and a pen, marking the most relevant information. They would later collect and rewrite this information, sometimes in the witness’s exact words and other times rephrased for clarity or concision, and collect it into the format with page-line numbers similar to what you see above.
The outcome is a much shorter version of the total transcript, often only a fraction of the total length of the deposition testimony.
How Can AI Generate a Reliable Page-Line Summary?
Artificial intelligence can be trained and programmed for a variety of tasks, and evaluating text to find the most relevant points within it is well within its capabilities. The initial stage of highlighting and underlining the text of the article can easily be done by AI.
Of course, a legal professional will always double-check, making sure that the AI didn’t miss any pertinent points, and that it didn’t overemphasize any information that was actually extraneous.
Next, the information needs to be broken down into summarized sections–something to which, once again, AI is uniquely suited. Creating categories and labels and fitting information beside relevant page and line numbers is arguably one of AI’s strongest suits, as it resembles data entry.
Once again, a team of legal professionals will always be necessary to ensure accuracy and comprehensibility in the outcome. But artificial intelligence can take what would have been a task of many hours and hundreds of dollars, and make it achievable in a brief amount of time.
Percipient Witness: Create Deposition Summaries From Testimony
While expert witnesses often provide testimony rife with technical details and relevant facts, witnesses to the event in question often present a very different set of data.
However eager to help they may be, they often have no training in how to present the facts of a case in an organized fashion. In addition, their emotional state can make their testimony even more difficult to place in a summary format.
Chronological Deposition Summary: Make the Complex Understandable
Despite the questioning attorney’s best efforts, even a key testimony can result in a nearly incomprehensible deposition transcript.
Witnesses remember facts seemingly at random, so an occurrence that came at the end of the narrative may be emphasized in the middle or the beginning of the deposition transcript, and the witness may remember key details from the beginning of the narrative only when they have reached the end of their deposition.
While a page-line deposition summary would shorten such a transcript, it would not make it any more comprehensible or relevant. In these cases, a chronological deposition summary may be necessary.
Below is an example of a chronological summary of a witness testimony that, when initially presented, included many confusing temporal leaps. Each paragraph opens with a page number so that anyone wanting to look up the relevant text in the deposition transcript may do so, but the material in the summary is presented in a chronological or narrative summary form.
Chronological Summary
Page 2
The witness describes the plaintiff’s symptoms prior to the discovery of the fibroids. He says that she had pelvic pain and heaviness, irregular periods, and difficulty conceiving since the birth of their fourth child. He also notes that the OBGYN had hinted in the past that they might consider some form of permanent birth control now that their family was becoming larger than average.
Page 1
The witness was present at the time when the plaintiff decided to get a hysterectomy on her OBGYN’s recommendation. The plaintiff was worried about the idea of such a drastic treatment but also understood the patient’s fear of cancer.
Page 3
When the plaintiff called the witness after the imaging procedure revealed the fibroids, he could tell that she was agitated. He recalls that he wondered if they should get a second opinion, but that she was very focused on when to schedule the surgery, saying they could always cancel later. But when the physician emphasized several times the size and weight of the fibroids she felt that a second opinion was unnecessary and that she wanted to go ahead with the surgery. While the witness had misgivings, he did not feel that he could press very hard since it was his wife’s body and he did not want to interfere.
A Simplified Deposition Summary
In the above deposition transcript, the pages are described in an altered order from the way they were presented in the deposition summary. This is because the witness presented events out of chronological order, which would have made the testimony more difficult to use in the legal case.
If a page-line deposition summary had been used for this deposition transcript, it would have served the purpose of making the information more accessible by shortening it to a very condensed form, but it would have been summarized in the same order in which the witness presented it–which the prosecution deemed to be less useful for the case than having it presented chronologically.
How AI Can Help Generate Chronological and Narrative Deposition Summaries
Traditionally, lawyers and paralegals might use a fairly similar method to create chronological deposition summaries that they would have used to create page-line summaries, by marking relevant information in highlighter and then numbering different passages according to their place in the actual order of events.
AI is capable of following a narrative thread and determining which parts of the story belong together. It is also learning to summarize information quickly and accurately, potentially saving many hours in the creation of your deposition summary.
As always, the work done by the AI needs to be vetted and tweaked for accuracy and style, but this is a work of moments rather than hours or days. The potential savings are substantial.
A Case Well Presented: How Deposition Summary Improves Your Case Management
When a legal representative presents a case to a judge, polish and organization quickly become apparent–and their lack can break an otherwise watertight case.
Having a well-written, well-organized deposition summary can make the presentation of the facts of the case much easier and more streamlined. No judge wants to dig through a hundred pages of rambling testimony; they want to know the facts that are Germaine, and they want everything to be presented in a comprehensible way.
If you are struggling to choose between possible deposition summary formats, or if you are interested in seeking the help of a deposition summary service, reach out to a professional who makes a living by crafting summarizing deposition transcript text down to a manageable size. They can certainly advise you and you may save as much as 30% compared to the cost of having your paralegals do the job.